Jesus Diaz

Nokia says that Ovi —door in Finnish— is a new Internet service for Nokia users to access music, games, maps, guides, synchronize information and network with friends using their devices and/or the PC. We say that they put Xbox 360 Live, iTunes, Flickr and Google Maps in a Turbo Mix and slapped an exotic-sounding name from an Ikea catalog on it. It looks nice, but will have to try it and see how well it replaces all those things (if at all).

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Their Music Store uses the web browser and is Windows Media-based, synching one song with up to 5 Nokia devices. They claim to have three million songs in their servers, compared to the five million of the iTunes Music Store.

The new N-Gage looks more exciting: taking a page from Microsoft's XBox 360 Live service, you can have your profiles, N-Gage points, game scores, friends and browse games using Ovi or your phone. Meanwhile, the Nokia Maps feature will allow you to get maps or guides optimized for your phone.

The most interesting feature should be the sync feature, which seems to have everything in your phone and PC synched together using the web. However, we haven't been able to try how deep this is and how well it really works. [OVI]